Mad City: The True Story of the Campus Murders That America Forgot

by Michael Arntfield

  Linda hit the Ypsilanti main drag at just after 10:00 p.m., the drive that should have taken ninety minutes from her last stop clocking in at just under five hours. Overnight she made a flashlight tour of the Eastern Michigan U campus, all of the locations she’d verified as places where victims were last seen or where remains or evidence were discovered relating to the murders of ’67—the first two of the set for which Collins, though deemed responsible, had never been charged. The next day, she made the drive in comparatively civilized weather conditions to the only place left to go, the forbidding Romanesque monolith known as the Marquette Branch Prison, perched high on the north shore of Lake Superior—another six hours away. Two years earlier the building had been federally listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Twenty-five years before that, the Detroit Red Wings played—and predictably throttled—the prisoner’s hockey team in an outdoor exhibition game as the guards slung 30-30 carbines, and cheered and jeered from the towers. But today it was all business. Linda had to see Collins face-to-face—she had to ask him herself about the first two girls killed between the summers of ’67 and ’68, ask him the questions the police never did about what he knew, what the ligatures and insertions in the throat in lieu of conventional rape might have meant—what they still meant in his mind.

  Even if Collins, and Collins alone, was good for these killings as the police suspected, she theorized that he and Jorgensen might have crossed paths, might have co-developed the MO and signature seen again elsewhere, such as in the Mad City. Otherwise, an audience with Collins in its own right—like Clarice Starling’s tutorials gleaned from Hannibal Lecter’s cryptic repartee in The Silence of the Lambs, a consultation said to be inspired by Washington State Detective Robert D. Keppel’s real-life consultation with Ted Bundy during the Green River Killer investigation—might provide her with better insight into what exactly made Dr. J. tick. It might also be another dead end.

  When Linda got to the prison just prior to closing, she’d learn before even breaching the main gates to sign in that Collins had been moved to full lockdown—watertight segregation, zero privileges. It was a necessary measure imposed by the warden following a foiled escape plot hatched by Collins just three weeks earlier, an internal investigation into an incipient tunneling scheme still underway. The new policy mandated no visitors. No exceptions. Linda regrouped, rummaged for change, and dropped a quarter in a pay phone to call Bill Share back in Milwaukee. Before she could fill him in on the details of yet another failure to launch, he did her one better. A contact on the inside with Uncle Sam—a “journalistic source” if there ever was one—had done him a solid. The source had found matching SSN and known-alias data previously used by Jorgensen—used as early as back in New York in the summer of ’68—as part of a credit check for a rental application in Flagstaff, Arizona. And Share had the address. It was fresh. It was vetted. A message appeared with flashbulb instantaneity in Linda’s mind’s eye, one Etch-a-Sketched with monochrome clarity: THE LEAD IS SOLID. THIS IS THE END OF THE LINE. SEIZE. THIS. MOMENT.

  Taken

  As Linda crawled her way out of Michigan to begin the nearly two-thousand-mile drive to Flagstaff, twenty-year-old Julie Speerschneider clocked off work to make her way to a local Madison fixture on University Avenue. The date was March 27, 1979; the time was 6:00 p.m. The place was the 602 Club, a charming dive bar carved out of the ground floor of a multipurpose tenement located, as the name implied, at 602 University Avenue—a straight shot south of the UW campus and situated near the student ghetto. More Main King Tap than Cardinal Hotel, it was a place whose local history was about to get a makeover as another unremarkable Madison watering hole soon to be soldered to the legend of the Capital City Killer.

  In the spring of ’79, the 602 Club was a Mad City enigma. Having defied the encroachment of disco music and its trappings into nearly every element of the local nightlife, the 602 “club” didn’t even have a jukebox. As other taverns of comparable size relied on old ceiling-mount television sets showing Packers, Bucks, and Brewers games to draw sports crowds, or rows of pool tables and other table games to keep patrons entertained and instinctively guzzling booze, the barkeeps at the 602 kept the one and only set behind the bar powered off. The result was that human conversation was the only racket patrons would hear upon darkening the door of the tiny hole-in-the-wall perched at the corner of University Avenue and Frances Street. The lone electronic devices that existed in the 602 were actually an odd set of intercoms installed in the various booths, allowing drinkers to simply buzz the bar for refills and relay orders through a loudspeaker mounted in the wall—pure genius, pure kitsch. Having once been known as the House of Sparking Glasses, by 1951 the aged building had been renamed to reflect its address before later morphing into the city’s first gay bar. In due course, the antique, flowered ceiling would rust and yellow to a rancid copper-tone brown after absorbing the smoke of countless cigarettes sucked to the filter by the eclectic assortment of regulars who came to call the place home. To this day, no one is sure how or why Julie Speerschneider ended up there in March of ’79 or whom she came to see. The even bigger question is what happened after she left.

  The interior of the 602 Club as it appeared in 1979, located at 602 University Avenue in Madison, a hole in-the-wall tavern with a cult following of both UW students and local regulars.

  As with Debbie Bennett, the circumstances surrounding the final hours of Julie Speerschneider’s life were destined to remain shrouded in mystery. After leaving the 602 Club mid evening—just after 8:30 p.m.—no one is certain what happened to her. Before leaving, she had first phoned a friend from the pay phone inside the bar and indicated she was on her way over. As usual, Julie’s intended method of travel was to be hitchhiking. The path would have taken her up Johnson Street from University Avenue, a short distance of under two miles. The difference is that, unlike Debbie Bennett and even Julie Ann Hall, she had a known, intended destination and someone waiting for her. When she didn’t turn up as expected, there was concern that something might be wrong. Within twenty-four hours, Julie’s friends and family had reported her missing to police. Within another twenty-four hours, both the Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal ran features on the case, complete with a reward of five hundred dollars for information leading to her whereabouts. On April 1, 1979—April Fool’s Day—a dark headline of “Missing Woman, 20, Sought,” along with a recent photograph of Julie, spelled out what the carefully veiled blotter item wouldn’t: that she was less missing as much as she was taken.

  The offer of the reward—albeit a modest one—coupled with the publicity, confirmed that Julie had been quickly shunted by the police into a high-risk category of missing person known as endangered missing. It meant that, in effect, someone had made her go missing, had made her disappear—that she was in life-threatening danger if not already dead. With no history of running away and with a pending destination she never arrived at, there was no other inference to be drawn. But there are countless cases of endangered missing women that never get reported as such, women like Debbie Bennett who, despite being in danger or already dead, nobody ever stops to worry about, much less goes looking for. Julie Speerschneider as endangered missing subsequently ensured that she was the first of the recent set of Madison victims not to fall into the dreaded category known as the missing missing—a person who is so socioeconomically alienated and devoid of personal support that their disappearance and even their murder goes unnoticed. Often, the person is not known to be missing or in jeopardy until it is too late, such as when a body is recovered and their final days, weeks, and even months and years are unaccounted for. While the fact was that Julie Ann Hall was an anomaly in this respect, as she was gainfully employed and had family and friends in Madison, Debbie Bennett would of course not be given a second thought until such time as her charred and ravaged corpse turned up in a ditch outside Cross Plains. Today, across countless cities in America, things remain largely unchanged.

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p; From Debbie Bennett as an example of the missing missing to Julie Ann Hall as a less flagrant version of the same—her disappearance more ignored than simply unknown—to now Julie Speerschneider as endangered missing complete with above-the-fold publicity, all indicators were that by 1969, Madisonians were beginning to realize that forces were now at work in the city that would change everything. Going back to the Rothschild job in ’68, a fuse had been lit that it seemed no one could put out. Indeed, things began to look even grimmer when the newspaper publicity and solicitation for information brought forth a man who claimed to have recognized Julie as the hitchhiker he picked up on the night she was last seen alive—when she walked out of the 602 Club by herself. The problem was that she wasn’t really by herself.

  Despite being alone when she set out for her friend’s address, the man claimed that Julie was hitchhiking in the company of another man who appeared to be squiring her through the three-way junction where State, Johnson, and Henry Streets converge—about half a mile from the 602 Club. Speaking to Julie and the mystery man through an open driver’s window, he was told that they were looking for a lift to the corner of Brearly and Johnson, a quick jaunt just over two miles up the road to the east. The motorist had told them to hop in, he said, before soon after dropping them off—a silent car ride the whole way—at their specified location less than one block from Julie’s friend’s home. When asked to provide a description of the mystery man squiring Julie that night, the driver drew a blank. There was nothing about him, whether good or bad, that managed to stand out. Good Samaritans aren’t, after all, particularly known for their observation skills. But there was one thing about the brief interaction that did stand out for the motorist, something he’d found unsettling. After checking the rearview mirror while he drove up Johnson Street only seconds after pulling away, the two hitchhikers had vanished.

  As weeks became months and months became years, the modest five-hundred-dollar reward for information on Julie’s whereabouts went unclaimed. In time, her classification as endangered missing unofficially changed to presumed dead. Although there had been no confirmatory evidence, behind closed doors Madison cops had effectively shelved the file. All the while, her parents Joan and David Speerschneider became increasingly reclusive in their small Lomax Drive home while still holding out hope. But while they stayed clear of the public eye, Julie’s friends pounded the pavement and doled out leaflets emblazoned with her photo. They diligently documented and passed on to police the details of countless false sightings offered by well-intentioned but mistaken Madisonians; they heard countless false “visions” and dealt with the bunk offered by fraudster clairvoyants. During this later period, little to nothing was done by police in terms of public appeals for the mystery man—the vanishing hitchhiker seen in the company of Julie when she was last alive—to come forward and present himself for questioning. Unlike the multijurisdictional task force working the Bennett murder and subsequent torching, which used intermittent media blitzes in an attempt to ferret out whoever had mailed her room key back to the Cardinal, no one in the Speerschneider investigation apparently ever followed up in an attempt to locate the unknown male seen at Julie’s side the night she disappeared. He was at the very least a key witness, even more likely her killer. The investigation was further hampered by the fact that, all speculation aside, there was no proof to confirm that Julie was in fact dead. There was also no crime scene, no body, no evidence of an actual crime. It was the missing link between Julie’s sudden disappearance and the series of other murders plaguing Madison—and the murders yet to come—that within the next two years would become tragically resolved.

  Familiar Figure

  Back in the vicinity of the Main King Tap, the sketchy watering hole east of the Capitol Square where Julie Ann Hall was last seen alive in June of ’78, there was, by the end of 1979, a new hangaround whom the police would later describe euphemistically as a “familiar figure.” By December of that same year, as Christmas shoppers shuffled along West Main and Pinkney and their children peered into store windows, twenty-four-year-old Susan LeMahieu had become a Main and King Street habitué. She could be frequently found loitering near that same intersection while popping in and out of the various bars and coffee shops that by then were known haunts for some of the prostitutes who had migrated from the Cardinal Hotel after the Debbie Bennett murder.

  Young Susan was not, however, a street worker or even a drug user. She was simply one of the forgotten, a cognitively delayed woman whose amalgam of mental and physical disabilities had left her partially paralyzed on her left side. She had largely been forsaken even by her own family as a result of her disability and later would be described insensitively—perhaps a sign of the times—as “retarded” in newspapers during the coming months. She was for all intents and purposes relegated to being the village idiot and a soon-to-be inconvenient victim for police amid the deluge of more photogenic missing and murdered coeds. Sent off to live in a state-funded chicken coop of a group home by her family, Susan resided at Allen Hall on nearby State Street where she was given room and board, but had taken to roaming the Mad City streets during the Christmas shopping season in hopes of finding some kind of human connection with somebody—anybody.

  By the time she was reported missing to Madison PD by the group home staff the night of December 19, a Wednesday, after she failed to turn up for the home’s imposed curfew on the previous Saturday, a belated and begrudgingly written report was filed but no media release was made and no real investigation undertaken. A “retarded” and physically disabled woman wandering the streets in subthermal conditions—with the Capital City Killer on the loose no less—was apparently little cause for concern. It’s also unclear whether the group home or police notified Susan LeMahieu’s family, parents separated, with her mother still residing in their East Madison home—not far from Allen Hall—where the rest of the family was apparently preparing to celebrate Christmas, apparently without Susan. If her mother Ruth—or even her father Gary who was by then living in the town of Mauston some eighty miles away in Juneau County—was notified, it would likely have been too much to bear. They might have thought, and would later know for certain, that history was repeating itself. Indeed, both Susan’s status as a burden and her parents’ marriage were casualties of family tragedies past.

  In 1966, when Susan was only ten years old, her two youngest brothers, Bill and Doug, age four and six respectively, suffocated to death after being trapped inside an abandoned old refrigerator left to rust in the basement of the family home. With four other siblings left alive, Susan—from a huge family like Julie Ann Hall and similarly being overlooked time and again—was sent to East Madison High before being apparently sentenced to life in an overcrowded group home. After successfully completing high school in 1974 but deemed unable to provide for herself or live alone, the supported living she was supposed to receive at Allen Hall, a long-term convalescent-care facility, amounted to three hots and a cot. The rest of the time she was left to wander the streets unsupervised. In fact, she was only admitted into the facility at all, given her age, following a fatal fire at the multistory sardine can a year prior, a five-alarm blaze that led the administrators to reexamine the risk of having too many enfeebled seniors on-site.

  Originally built in 1962 to serve as a women’s dorm for UW students, by the end of ’69 the Frances Street building was repurposed into a facility for the disabled. Less than four years later, on January 8, 1973, a sixty-year-old resident burned to death and a twenty-two-year-old part-time care worker—a UW–Madison student to boot—died of smoke inhalation. The student had been trying to use a simple fire extinguisher to battle an accidental fire that, after mysteriously starting in a resident’s room, quickly consumed the entire structure. Scores more were seriously injured, including three firefighters, as wheelchairs became entangled in the lobby amid unleashed mayhem. With the student employee left for dead by the other staff and the residents left scrambling, the Red Cross quick
ly arrived to stabilize the situation and assist emergency personnel. Several days later, after a second resident died of injuries, questions started to get asked. Amid the scrutiny, the ensuing room vacancies led to Susan being short-listed.

  After six years of a proverbial life sentence at the recently renovated Allen Hall, a despondent Susan had taken to wandering the streets rather than remaining in solitary confinement in her meager room. No one can blame her. Although the home’s policy required that police be notified after Susan failed to return on the night of December 15, they failed to do so. Ditto for December 16, 17, and 18. Only on the night of December 19, a full four days after last being seen alive, was Susan reported missing. By then, there was also no confirmed last sighting of her for police to go on. While perhaps a “familiar figure” in the area of the now-infamous Main King Tap, no one knew her name or thought much of seeing her or not seeing her. No one, it seems, was paying attention. For whoever’s attention she did get that night, she was the ideal victim. In Madison, she was the invisible woman, another one of the missing missing.